Middlebrow Modernism: Britten's Operas and the Great Divide

Abstract

This study examines the way Britten's operas and their audiences muddied the waters of the so-called "great divide" between modernism and mass culture, mediating between the aesthetics of difficulty and distinction on the one hand, and the pleasures and conventions associated with popular opera on the other. Using the fraught responses of early critics as a way in, I examine the precise musical and critical strategies through which the operas confounded a range of marked modernist binaries - between innovation and tradition, difficulty and sentimentality, modernism and mass culture. One of the main appeals of Britten's operas, I argue, lay in providing mid-century audiences with the chance to have their modernist cake and eat it, to revel in the putatively "cheap" pleasures of consonance, lyricism and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that flows from rejecting them.